Setting captives free
by James Pender

Globalisation is turning sex into a commodity, but it's not just tourists who benefit from the flesh trade. James Pender reveals the horrific shadow side of Asia’s much-vaunted “family values”.

Cross border smuggling is a worldwide phenomenon, and Bangladesh’s long land border with India is a conduit for an illegal flow of alcohol, drugs, arms and other goods the duty on which smugglers intend to avoid.

For a fee of about 10p corrupt border guards in both countries can be easily tempted to look the other way and let travellers pass, usually with a local guide or middleman who handles such inconveniences.

But it is not just bottles and packages that cross borders. Some of the traded goods that are smuggled can feel pain, are ferociously beaten and see things that will burn images that will recur as nightmares for a lifetime. They are told things that are intended to humiliate and permanently destroy their self-image.

The trade in human beings trickles nightly across the border from districts like Meherpur in Bangladesh, into India. Each night 55 young women and girls are estimated as being trafficked across the border, amounting to a staggering 20,000 per year, and over a million in the past 30 years. Mostly aged between 14 and 25, two thirds of them are destined to be used sexually by employers or as commercial prostitutes. The rest will be exploited in other ways by becoming unpaid manual labourers, or even as sources for body parts for medical transplants for the rich. Many will end up in brothels in Indian commercial centres like Mumbai, or will be re-exported to similar establishments in centres like Dubai in the Middle East.

Globalisation and economic liberalisation policies encouraged by Western governments have meant that a lot of people in Asia have become poorer while a relatively small élite has become a lot richer. There is an insidious view that all this is inevitable.

William Wilberforce, the first president of the Church Mission Society (CMS) when he began his fight against the slave trade, was told by well meaning, even Christian friends that it was a hopeless cause.

“The slave trade was essential to the function of trade and commerce in the British Empire,” he notes being told. In fact this terrible trade, which involves similar numbers of girls being trafficked from Nepal, as from Bangladesh into India, has been described as probably the busiest slave traffic of its kind anywhere in the world.

The humanity behind the statistics is often overlooked, perhaps because their plight is too much for us to bear. Nasima was from a family of nine. They could not afford to send her or any of her brothers and sisters to school, and her father could barely even feed them. So when for a fee a man offered to help her get a job in India, it seemed a solution. She would no longer go hungry and she could help support her family. But instead of a job she was imprisoned, beaten daily and forced to work as an unpaid prostitute for over four years until managing to escape.

In the eyes of Meherjan’s fellow villagers, at age 28 she was getting old. The pressure for her to be married was increasing, but her father was a poor fisherman who could not afford the expensive dowry for the groom and his family. In Bangladesh dowry works like a bribe paid by the bride's family to get girls off their hands. So when a cousin from India offered to help arrange a marriage for Meherjan in India at no cost, her family were overjoyed. This cousin, her own flesh and blood, raped and physically tortured her for many months, before selling her to someone who hired her out to dozens of men each night.

Return to their villages should have been a welcome relief for these girls, but their families are as poor as ever, and the girls now have to live with the stigma and suspicion attached with them due to their time in India. Villagers suspect what they have been doing, but view them not as victims but as immoral women who would corrupt others and bring shame on their villages.

There is a tiny flicker of hope: Dr Lalita Edwards, a CMS medical Partner offers counselling and HIV/AIDS awareness with sex workers in the brothels of Pune, India, and prays with the girls. She works quietly: the madams forbid mention of the name of Jesus because they lose the girls if they become Christians. CMS also recently began supporting Juliate Malakar of the Church of Bangladesh Social Development Programme to work in the border villages around Meherpur, one of the major trafficking areas. She recently opened a tailoring course there for former victims of the sex trade: Nasima and Meherjan are her two newest recruits. They will train for three months and then with the help of a low interest loan start a business, which will give them renewed respect in their communities as well as a way out of poverty.

Juliate, one of the minority Christian community that numbers 0.3 per cent of the largely Muslim population, has an MA in Social Development and has been flown to Britain to speak about her work: ‘I am really very much privileged. Now I just want to help give the women I work with the mental strength to struggle with these opportunities. Women are not usually involved in the decisions that affect their lives. The situations they face are horrific.’

The project has also produced a high quality drama that was recently staged in a border village in front of a crowd of 1000 people drawing them into the story of a trafficked girl and warning them of the dangers to other young women and girls. These and other activities will be extended to places like the capital Dhaka. The project there now employs five vulnerable young girls from the squalid slum areas in producing jute wristbands, for a fair wage, to highlight CMS’s ‘Setting Captives Free’ focus as well as linking to the Make Poverty History advocacy campaign.

The irony is that it is jute, still one of Bangladesh’s principle exports, that is used to tie the girls’ hands and feet once they are captive.

To obtain further information to highlight this issue for prayer and action in your church or youth group, contact Russell Price at CMS.  To order wristbands, go to http://www.cms-shop.org.uk/mall/productpage.cfm/CMS/CMS24/82465

E-mail: russell.price@cms-uk.org
Tel.: 020 7928 8681 or direct on 020 7803 3375